"The role of networking teams is evolving," said Josh Schertzer, managing director at Blackstone. "It's the networking team's job to deliver applications from the cloud and data centers to employees around the globe, with extremely high availability, performance and security. Virtualizing the remote office and reducing WAN costs are a priority for many enterprises. The industry needs an application-defined platform for the remote office that's much more than the hybrid-WAN-only approaches we've seen traditionally. The goal is for IT to deploy applications anywhere in the world within minutes based on App-SLAs -- without complex routing re-engineering."

Modern applications, including cloud and collaboration apps, impose new requirements on the WAN. According to Microsoft's guidelines for Office 365 adoption, enterprises should plan for up to 4X increase in WAN bandwidth, and enable direct-to-cloud access from the remote office to avoid sub-optimal performance.

"The increasing use of modern applications requires that enterprises look beyond traditional networking to new ways of building and managing WANs," said Jim Metzler, founder and vice president of Ashton, Metzler and Associates. "Modern applications combine multiple services, are collaborative, and can be hosted anywhere. This requires enterprises to move from managing network SLAs to application SLAs."

The WAN must support rich experiences offered by modern applications -- rich media, collaboration apps, voice apps -- all of which can reside in your data center or in the cloud, and put enormous strains on WAN design and the security architecture. By moving cloud access directly to the remote office, the CloudGenix application-defined fabric creates a secondary security perimeter, ensuring that only "white listed" applications are allowed to leave the remote office directly and that malicious traffic is prevented from entering the branch.

"Enterprises face multiple issues with legacy hardware models for the remote office," said Kumar Ramachandran, founder and CEO of CloudGenix. "Innovation is held hostage to depreciation cycles -- multiple pieces of hardware to maintain, complex routing protocols to manage, and inability to deploy best-of-breed solutions. With our application-defined fabric, enterprises are no longer hostage to their hardware vendors, and have the freedom to deploy their applications anywhere, enhancing both application performance and security posture."

The ION3000v is available immediately. For more information, please visit www.cloudgenix.com.

About CloudGenixCloudGenix (www.cloudgenix.com) is the software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) leader, revolutionizing networking by transforming legacy WANs into a radically simplified, secure, application-defined fabric and virtualizing heterogeneous underlying transports into a unified hybrid WAN. Enabling application-specific, service-level agreements (SLAs), CloudGenix controls network application performance based upon application-performance SLAs and business priority. CloudGenix ION (Instant-On Network) radically simplifies how WANs are designed and managed, enabling customers to build "networks without networking," and achieve more than twice the performance at less than half the cost -- leading to a much faster time-to-value once deployed -- and extending data center-class security to the network edge. Founded in 2013 by a team that has previously delivered industry-leading products in networking, SDN, cloud, security and web-scale applications, CloudGenix serves world-class financial services, legal, retail and technology organizations. The company is backed by Bain Capital Ventures, Charles River Ventures and the Mayfield Fund and has headquarters in San Jose, California.